Category / Research

Fertilizer subsidies in India currently account for the second-largest government transfer, with estimated outlays of over 700 billion rupees (USD 10 billion) projected for the 2018-19 fiscal year. Because of the vast size of fertilizer subsidies and the subsequent market distortions they introduce, India’s fertilizer subsidies have been the subject of much scrutiny for some time. Among other effects, these subsidies introduce arbitrage opportunities whereby subsidized fertilizer supplies from India can be smuggled across porous borders into Nepal and Bangladesh and sold in so-called ‘grey markets.’ Several reforms have been introduced in recent years in an attempt to improve the distribution of fertilizers across the country, including the introduction of the mobile fertilizer management system (mFMS), which electronically tracks fertilizer supplies down the supply chain from manufacturer to input dealer. More recently, the Government of India has introduced what is commonly referred to – albeit incorrectly – as a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme for fertilizers. The government has previously introduced DBT programs for liquefied petroleum gas cylinders for domestic use, and several state governments have recently introduced DBT schemes for seeds. One of the primary motivations behind DBT for fertilizers is that it would enable better monitoring of transactions of heavily subsidized fertilizer across the country. Digitizing purchases would also allow inventories to be managed better and the system’s demand-prediction ability to be improved, given that most of the annual demand is concentrated into 3–4 months. A longer-term goal is to integrate land records and fertilizer recommendations through their Aadhaar (unique identification) numbers so that, at the time of purchase, farmers would only be allowed to purchase subsidized fertilizer according to the recommendations on their soil health cards.

I am excited to announce that I have recently accepted a position of Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). DKU is a partnership of Duke University and Wuhan University, located in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, China. So, suffice it to say, Sarah, Chewbacca, and I will be moving to China! I will officially be starting on July 1, but we will be moving in June to give ourselves a little time to get settled in before diving into work. We are all very excited about what lies ahead!

Some research that I have recently been contributing to in Malawi suggests that incentives–particularly those that leverage network externalities–could accelerate the adoption of conservation agriculture practices. In the long run, a payments-for-ecosystem services program could create exactly the sort of feedback loop that would be necessary for sustained adoption of these types of soil conservation measures.

I recently helped co-organize a high-level regional stakeholders’ dialogue to discuss the challenges and opportunities for providing agricultural insurance to farmers in South Asia. Specifically, the focus was on how we, as members of the agricultural research community, could better contribute tot the design, implementation, and evaluation of large scale agricultural insurance programs. Here is an IFPRI blog that describes the events and some of the main takeaways.

Many agricultural development programs are ideally positioned to support the widespread adoption of “sustainable intensification” technologies and management practices. While the science underlying these programs may be well-established, their actual success hinges critically on their ability to overcome a myriad of institutional and implementation challenges, particularly since many operate in environments fraught with risks, notably increasingly erratic weather. This is especially true in South Asia, which has been the victim of a progressively unpredictable and variable monsoon.

Economic theory makes several unambiguous predictions regarding smallholder farmers’ decision making under risk. Without adequate strategies for managing risks, farmers tend to behave in an overly conservative fashion, storing assets in highly liquid—though lower-return—forms, and opting for lower-risk, lower-return input-use strategies. While such strategies may reduce production or profit variability, they do so via costly mechanisms that inhibit a household’s long-term growth trajectory. An obvious implication of the theory is that mitigating risks should lead to a reversal of these predictions, encouraging greater investments in higher risk, higher returning activities.

One method for mitigating these risks is insurance, which allows farmers to transfer a portion of their risk to the insurer. While theoretically workable, attempts to provide formal, indemnity-based crop insurance have struggled for various reasons. Most notably, conventional insurance suffers from high administrative and transaction costs, as well as asymmetric information between insured and insurer, which in turn gives rise to adverse selection and moral hazard.

Consequently, many policy makers and practitioners have turned to index-based insurance programs, which base their payments on the performance of some transparent, easy-to-measure index relative to some benchmark—such as weather data or average area yields. But because insurance payments are based on index performance rather than direct on-field assessments, index insurance results in a nontrivial probability that farmers will not be compensated even when they experience significant losses. This residual risk—known as basis risk—has been identified as a significant impediment in many index insurance programs piloted around the world.

A recent IFPRI Discussion Paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial designed to assess both the demand for and effectiveness of an innovative index insurance product in rural Bangladesh. The insurance product was designed to help smallholder farmers manage risks related to droughts during the aman rice-growing season (monsoon season). While many drought index insurance products have been piloted in the past, the current product was designed to address multiple dimensions of drought risk, enabling farmers to manage risks associated with both diminished crop yields as well as increased production costs. To that end, the insurance design incorporates a weather index to offset risks associated with increased production costs—particularly utilization of supplemental irrigation—due to prolonged dry spells, with an accompanying area yield index to protect against risks associated with yield losses, regardless of the cause of the losses.

Demand for the index insurance product was found to be quite price-sensitive, and consistent with empirical evidence from both developed and developing countries around the world, we observed very little insurance take-up without incentives (in the form of discounts and rebates). But these incentives were largely successful in increasing insurance coverage, with discounts resulting in higher coverage in aggregate relative to rebates.

Despite theoretical and empirical evidence that present bias and other factors may constrain demand, we find that much of the variation in take-up rates that can be explained is due to the type and level of incentives, with other characteristics and preferences explaining relatively little variation in demand. One notable exception is risk aversion. We found evidence that more risk-averse individuals purchase lower index insurance coverage, likely due to their aversion to residual basis risk. Offering these individuals a rebate instead of a discount could lead to increased insurance coverage, as they implicitly viewed rebates as a commitment savings mechanism that can offset the costs associated with basis risk, especially if they experience on-farm losses yet are not indemnified by the insurance.

Perhaps more interestingly, we found evidence of both ex ante risk mitigation effects as well as ex postincome or liquidity effects. Ex ante, risk mitigation increased agricultural production along the intensive margin during the aman season. In particular, insurance resulted in increased agricultural input expenditures for aman rice production, with the total increase exceeding the average potential insurance payouts. Notably, however, the increase in expenditures was not distributed uniformly over all inputs, but reflected investments biased in favor of several modern agricultural inputs, notably irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. In percentage terms, the increases in input expenditures are striking. Insured farmers invested 23 percent more on fertilizers than they would have without insurance, which, other things being equal, increased farmers’ yield potential. Insurance coverage on the cost of production risk also resulted in a roughly 25 percent increase in investments in irrigation, likely indicative of efforts to mitigate the yield impact of prolonged dry spells that were recorded in the 2013 aman season. We also observed a 22 percent increase in pesticide use, suggesting that even with drought risks ameliorated by the index insurance product, the problems of moral hazard that plague traditional indemnity-based insurance programs do not arise.

Ex post, the additional income realized from the insurance payouts prior to boro (dry season) land preparation led to increased production along the extensive margin. In particular, the disbursement of insurance payments provided farmers with a liquidity injection that led to an expansion of boro area and increased expenditures on seeds, resulting in an overall increase in boro rice production. While we were not able to ascertain precisely whether the increase in seed expenditures was solely due to the increase in area or whether it reflected farmers investing in new seeds as part of a quest for higher yields, such investments nevertheless increase farmers’ exposure to technological improvements embodied in newer varieties. While this ex post income effect likely only arose due to the insurance payout (since there was essentially no effect on aman yields or total production) we posit that a similar income effect could be realized even under situations in which the insurance payouts are not triggered. Such an event would occur under more optimal weather conditions, and the increased investments in modern inputs—in particular fertilizers and pesticides—arising from the ex ante risk mitigation effects should result in higher yields, which in turn could generate a similar ex post income effect. Since we have limited exogenous variation in insurance performance to exploit, this remains merely a plausible hypothesis.

The results from this study have important policy implications for promoting agricultural risk management as a means to a more productive and profitable end for agricultural development in Bangladesh. The study provides convincing evidence that index insurance can provide farmers with the peace of mind needed to encourage investments in higher risk, higher return agricultural production. While there may be need for government interventions to subsidize the cost of insurance, the long-term benefits of these public expenditures may exceed their costs.